


Another Chapter

by mrstater



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Power Imbalance, Romance, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-18
Updated: 2012-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 18:30:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrstater/pseuds/mrstater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mary agrees to write another chapter in the book of Haxby Park, she unexpectedly writes a new start to her story with Sir Richard. But what sort of story will it be? And will she like it? [S2E6 AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic continues the Haxby scene in S2E6 and then deviates pretty drastically from the rest of the episode/S2. I hope it's a good read for those of you who would like to have seen Mary and Richard make a little more of an attempt at having an actual relationship.

_"So. Shall we rescue it? Shall we give the house another chapter?"_

 _"Well. I suppose one has to live somewhere."_

"One has to live somewhere," Richard repeats Mary's own words back to her, slowly, as he slides his hand along the gilded black balustrade and takes a step nearer to her. "Just the sort of unsentimental reply I'd expect from one of _your lot_."

The dimples beneath his high cheekbones deepen with his smirk, and for a moment she imagines they must somehow have been transported back in time to Cliveden, where she first took notice of him because of that expression. Which of course had been intensely irritating to her, because it presumed to question, and even mock, the aristocratic ways. Her ways.

Yet it had been intensely intriguing, as well, because it admired, and envied, who she is. And her heart raced with the exhilaration of having that sort of power over a man-then and now-because it makes her feel like herself again, for the first time since the war started, or since long before that, really. Lady Mary Crawley, the belle of the county, who enjoys her admirers whilst never doing anything so foolish as falling in love with them.

She raises her chin, and an eyebrow. "Whereas by talking of rescues and chapters, you're teetering perilously close to the sort of vulgar sentiment I'd expect from one of yours."

His fingertips slide over hers, the warmth of them that actually reaches her through her kid glove so startling that she draws in a sharp breath before she can stop herself. Of course Richard, consummate newspaperman that he is, doesn't miss it, she can see from the deepening crisscross of lines at the corners of his eyes. Not as striking as another pair of blue eyes she has peered into, but they see her with greater clarity. And that's something.

Quite a lot of something, in fact.

"Come now, Mary," Richard says, his fingers stroking her knuckles until she can't help but relax her grip on the banister and curl her hand around his instead. "Surely you don't intend to continue this charade of _yours_ and _mine_. We're to share a name, a home… a bed."

She's softening under his touch and the husky tones of his voice and even the words themselves, maudlin though they are, until he has to go and be coarse and talk about sex. While looking at her lips, too.

Her only consolation is that Richard probably would talk about sex even if she was a blushing virgin, and isn't taking liberties just because he knows she's not. It's not s a great consolation, but she probably ought to thank him for reminding her what sort of person she has agreed to marry.

Before she can say anything, his eyes swing back up to meet hers. "Surely you won't begrudge my not being fashionably blasé when I have, after all, waited nearly two years for this."

"Waited? For what? For me to reveal a dirty little secret that obliges me to marry you?"

Richard's grip tightens around Mary's fingers and she gasps. Not because he's hurt her with his aggression, but because he's holding her as one might bear down on another person's hand in a moment of pain. But that can't be possible, can it? Sir Richard Carlisle can't be wounded. He hasn't invested enough feeling in this relationship for her to have that power.

No sooner has the thought flitted through her mind than he releases her, only to capture her again, cupping her face in his hands; Mary's back meets the pillar behind her as Richard closes the gap between their bodies with a kiss.

For a flash she thinks of Kemal Pamuk's long, tanned fingers touching her the same way, his tongue making its bold advance into her mouth when it opened in a gasp as he drove her back against the saloon wall, and her hands go up instinctively to push him away, until she realises that this is not the Turk's lust-fuelled kiss. Despite the assertion with which Richard initiated it, the tips of his fingers trace delicate patterns along her cheeks, her jaw, her neck; the press of his lips, at first insistent, yields to hers as she, much to her own astonishment, wraps her fingers around his wrists and kisses him back.

This close up he smells of his pomade and too much cologne covering whisky and cigars and the newspaper he couldn't take his nose out of during the drive over-none of the scents that should cling to any fiancé of _hers_. He tastes, however, of patience and two years' longing, and Mary savours it, and the dulling of the bitterness that has filled her mouth for so long that she's no longer certain what sweetness is.

When Richard presses one last, firm kiss to her lips before standing proudly erect again, she is sorrier than she ought to be. And more pleased than she ought to be, too, when his fingers linger about her neck, caressing her skin just below the collar of her jacket as he smiles down at her, his eyes crinkled at the corners in an expression which, worn by any other man, she would call tender.

"My," she says, her voice too short of breath to sound appropriately blasé. "What sort of story is this we've agreed to add chapters to?"

"I know what genre _I'd_ like it to be," Richard says, catching her hands when she starts to lower them, his gaze commanding hers even as his lips graze her knuckles, not allowing her to break it to roll her eyes at this second intimation of sex.

Not that Mary is certain she would do even if she had that freedom.

"But that editorial decision," he adds, drawing her hand into the crook of his arm as he guides her down Haxby's great white marble staircase, "I leave to you."

* * *

"There may be some family things I can persuade Papa to send with me to Haxby," Mary says during the drive home. "Mama's been at him to get a few of the rooms more up-to-date. And she collects horrid American paintings he won't let her hang anywhere. She might give us a few of those so our walls won't be completely bare. We won't have to buy _everything_. Only mostly everything."

She sighs, as much at the indignity of being reduced to buying an estate from an old family friend fallen on hard times and having to furnish it from scratch, as at the fact that the man who will be buying all of this for her is apparently too buried in his own newspaper to even listen.

Sharp words form on the tip of her tongue, words she's chastised Richard with before-that people might forget he must work for his living if he'd ever stop working in front of them. But at the last moment she stays them, remembering _his_ words-of new chapters, and of waiting.

And, most of all, remembering his kiss. When she looks at his mouth, lips pressed together in a thin pale line as he reads, she can almost feel the warmth of them on hers.

She hasn't given Richard much of a chance, she realises, not since they met and certainly not since he made his awkward proposal to her at the station two years ago. She owes him that much.

And she'd like to give herself a chance, too, now that she knows they might actually have something of the moon and the June between them, after all. If only she'll let them.

"That reminds me," Richard's voice breaks into her musing, underscored by the rustle of his newspaper as he folds it up and slides a little nearer to her on the bench seat. "I've already arranged for something to come with you from Downton to Haxby."

"Oh? And what's that?"

"Well-not _what_ so much as _who_."

His blue eyes twinkle, and one corner of his mouth quirks upward, and he looks so extremely pleased with himself that Mary can't let him get away with it just yet, even though her curiosity's piqued and her pulse quickens with the thought that he's orchestrated a surprise for her.

She arches a wary eyebrow at him. "Oh dear. You haven't invited old Edith, the maiden aunt, to live with us, have you? Because honestly I'd rather go to a department store and buy brand new modern furniture."

"Close." Richard takes her hand, which rests on her lap, in his. "Only it's someone you like."

Mary laughs. "I can't imagine...You haven't asked Anna on as head housemaid, have you?"

To her surprise, he wilts slightly. "I will if you'd like me to."

She would, very much, but- "It's very ill-bred to steal other people's servants."

Richard glances away, plainly embarrassed. "I thought it rather more imperative to secure a butler before a maid."

If Mary were the one driving, she'd have stepped on the brake in her surprise. Thankfully Branson's managed not to get himself drafted, so her reputation for cold composure-perhaps the only reputation she's got left, at least in Richard's eyes-remains untarnished.

"Are you trying to give Papa more reasons to dislike you?" she asks.

He meets her eyes again. "Seeing as it's you I'm marrying and not Lord Grantham, it's not him I ought to worry about pleasing, is it?"

Mary doesn't blink, so as not to miss the smirk she fully expects to follow such boldly defiant words.

But Richard doesn't smirk. In fact, she's never seen him look more earnest. Not even when he proposed to her.

He's noticed, she thinks, her heart accelerating in her chest, faster than the car speeds down the road. Noticed how very fond of Carson she is. And has done one of those things well-bred people simply don't do-just to please her.

And how many people of even the most unblemished pedigree have really tried to do that?

Out the corner of her eye, she glimpses Branson watching them in the mirror, and she tears her gaze from Richard.

But she gives his hand a discrete squeeze and says, "It is hard to find good help these days."

She discretely watches as Branson swings his eyes back to the road, shaking his head with an undisguised expression of disgust-really, they'd all be better off if Papa would sack Branson and let Edith play chauffeur-then gives Richard a small smile.

"Why settle for good," he says, returning it, and threading their fingers together, "when we can have the best?"


	2. Chapter 2

"How did you find Haxby Park?" Matthew addresses Mary across the dinner table, which stands just enough too high for his wheelchair as to make him look boyish and awkward, and to make her unable to return his smile. She swallows her chicken and tastes the bitterness of guilt his question stirs. She didn't take him for a walk about the grounds this afternoon as planned; instead she'd allowed Richard to ensconce her in the library to help him scour the papers for advertisements of auctions.  
  
Or maybe it's the thought of auctions having anything to do with her that makes Mary feel a little ill.  
  
She takes a fortifying sip of wine and replies with a nonchalant tip of her head, "Well, it has a much prettier staircase than Downton..." A sideways glance at Richard shows him to be puffing out his chest beneath his starched white shirt in such a way that she half-expects him to start preening. She can't resist adding, after another drink, "It's big. Very big. And completely empty."  
  
Her words seem resonant even in Downton's well furnished dining room, where all the family are gathered but Sybil, who's on duty at the hospital; Granny takes her place, no doubt having invited herself over for the express purpose of hearing about the visit to Haxby. None of them says anything, leaving Richard to fill the void.  
  
Which he does not hesitate to do. Too loudly, and with too broad a smile. Always _too_ , with Richard. "Then we shall have to fill it up with a lot of children."  
  
Mary flushes and can meet nobody's eyes, though of course, she realises, belatedly, they're all looking at Matthew, anyway. Poor Matthew, who's trying so hard to be happy for her even though his prospects of filling his own estate with children, or of producing even a single heir, by her or Lavinia or any other woman, are hopeless.  
  
The burning in Mary's cheeks is from anger now. She turns to glower at Richard, certain that he said it purposely to gloat over his imagined rival--but finds that his smile has faltered and his eyes are on the utensils he's holding.  
  
She lets out her breath; it might be a charade, but at least he has the grace to _look_ ashamed.  
  
His eyes flick up to hers, and his smile returns, though more restrained now than before his faux pas.  
  
"Or host a lot of dinner parties," he says, and the tension is broken with a polite chuckle from around the table, followed by the resumed clinks and scrapes of silverware against china, and Richard only making people uncomfortable in the usual way, of talking openly about money.  
  
"I've a meeting with the house agent first thing in the morning to discuss my offer."  
  
"But tomorrow is _Sunday_ ," says Granny.  
  
"I'm taking the early train back to London Monday, Lady Grantham. Sunday's my only chance." Richard chuckles, clearly having thought of a retort he finds excessively clever. "God may be able to afford a day of rest, but I can't."  
  
"Indeed? Only you talk so much about your money I was under the impression there was nothing you couldn't afford."  
  
Laughter dying, Richard considers Granny for a moment; then, beaten, he takes a drink and reverts his attention to Papa as Granny does her best to take a bite of chicken around her pleased smirk. Mary's own amusement at seeing her fiancé taken down a peg, however, wanes when her eyes flick to Matthew's and instead of sharing a silent laugh across the table as they would have in the old days, she finds him gazing at her sadly. Pitying her, no doubt, for having a fiancé who compels people to take him down a peg.  
  
"I expect I'll be able to drive quite a bargain for Haxby," Richard's voice draws her out of her thoughts, "in light of all the improvements necessary to make the place liveable."  
  
"A _fair_ price, I should hope," says Papa, his brow heavy over the top of his wine glass, "with respect to what the Russells have been through, poor family."  
  
Richard opens his mouth to say something no doubt uncompassionate about the _poor Russells'_ financial state, but thankfully Mama speaks first.  
  
"It's a shame they've taken all the furniture." She smiles at Mary. "Though what fun you'll have fitting it out to your own taste. No mother-in-laws to clash with."  
  
"Clash is certainly the word for your colour scheme in the drawing room," mutters Granny.  
  
Blessedly, that puts an end to any further talk of Haxby at dinner, but Edith pounces on the subject again the moment the ladies are released to go through for coffee.  
  
"What _will_ you do about furniture?"  
  
"Oh, Edith, _please_. Why must you make it sound as if it's some salacious scandal you read about in one of Richard's papers?"  
  
"I know what gossip I might read about you," Edith replies, but her face, twisted with spite, goes slack at the same moment as Mary feels a strong hand at her elbow.  
  
She's told Richard a dozen times, at least, not to go through with the ladies, but this time she's grateful for his ignorance of etiquette--or his habit of ignoring it--for Edith's remark put her quite off-balance; Papa and Matthew are probably glad for it, too, though not for the same reasons.  
  
"People are selling estates left and right, and they certainly can't fit all that furniture into their townhouses," Richard says, guiding her to the settee next to the matching armchair on which Granny perches, though Mary, recovering from the blow Edith dealt her, finds she is too full of nervous energy to sit beside him. "We've looked out a few auctions which should fit Haxby out nicely."  
  
" _Auctions_?"  
  
"Yes, Granny, _auctions_." Mary does her best to sound appalled with her grandmother's lack of knowledge, but fears her own prejudice against the idea creeps into her tone. "Gatherings where things are sold to the highest bidder."  
  
"I _know_ what an auction is, my dear." Granny's pale blue eyes fix on Richard. "What I do _not_ know is how any person would go to one in good taste. One rather thinks of vultures."  
  
"Coffee, Sir Richard?" asks Carson, and as Richard takes a cup and saucer from the butler, he looks up at Mary, uncertainty etched on his features as she's only seen it once before, the first weekend he came up to Downton dressed for a shoot instead of a walk.  
  
"We could buy new instead," he offers, but Granny balks at that, too, giving a cough that sounds distinctly like the words _middle class_.  
  
"What would you prefer we do, Granny?" asks Mary. "Sleep on the bare floor?"  
  
She makes the mistake of glancing at Richard, whose look of confusion gives way to a smirk which makes her think of the remark he'd made at Haxby about sharing a bed, and at dinner about having a lot of children to fill up the house. Heat prickles at the neckline of her gown, creeping up her neck and into her cheeks as she remembers the warmth of Richard's hands cupping her face and his mouth covering hers and the balustrade solid against her back as he kissed her, deepening crimson as her gown as-- _of course_ \--the men choose that precise moment to join them for coffee, Matthew's eyes haunting her from across the room as Carson wheels him in. Her coffee tastes even more bitter as his gaze stirs up her guilt at not keeping her promise to hurry back from Haxby and keep him company, at thinking of adding new chapters to her life's story when the covers seems to have been clapped shut on Matthew's before his book can be completely written.  
  
"Will you wait to marry until the work's finished on the house?" Mama's broad American drawl is an unwelcome interruption of her musings; she could not have chosen a more inappropriate question to ask had she been privy to Mary's thoughts.  
  
"We haven't discussed a date yet," Mary replies, not for the first time since their engagement announcement ran in the paper.  
  
She means to brush the question aside, but she's not thinking on her feet--Matthew has turned his attention to Edith and Papa--and Richard won't be brushed off. Not now. Not when he's at the brink of buying a house for her. For them.  
  
"I think the work can be finished by spring," he says, "if I really crack the whip. And I'm quite good at that."  
  
Granny's fingers curl dangerously around the pommel of her cane, boring the tip so hard it seems likely she'll impale the carpet, and possibly the floorboards beneath it. "Auctions, whips...are you a newspaper man, Sir Richard, or a slave driver?"  
  
"I won't deny I've acquired that reputation," Richard admits with a chuckle, looking for all the world as if Granny paid him a compliment--the arrogant great idiot.  
  
"Slavery went out of fashion centuries ago."  
  
"That's rather hyperbolic, Mama, don't you think?" interjects Papa, without a great deal of conviction, the conversation between Granny and Richard having drifted across the drawing room to him.  
  
Once more Mary's eyes meets Matthew's, her heart skipping a beat to see them glowing with life as they have not since he was brought injured to Downton, clearly amused by the sparring match between her fiancé and her grandmother. Is he, too, thinking of his early days among her family, when his work as a solicitor evinced a similar scandalised reaction from Granny? Does he remember when she asked, _What's a weekend?_  
  
"But a work ethic didn't," argues Richard, which, incredibly, seems to be the very last thing Granny expected him to do. "If it makes you feel any better, Lady Grantham, I hold myself to the same standard as anyone in my employ."  
  
"It doesn't."  
  
Richard drains his coffee cup and sets it on the side table behind Mary, then reaches for her hand, the touch of his warm fingers drawing her--unwillingly--from the cool, restive blue of Matthew's eyes. He tugs at her hand, too, indicating he'd like for her to sit beside him, and she's too weary to resist.  
  
"What do you think, darling?" Richard asks, grinning at her. "Shall we make it a spring wedding so I can be a real April gentleman? Or would you prefer to be a June bride?"  
  
She'd prefer to be Matthew's bride, or no one's at all. Even if Richard is being sweet and sentimental and every romantic cliché she never believed him capable of. Is it an act? Or had his fashionable aloofness been the act? _I've waited two years for this_ , he'd said. _I know what sort of story I'd like it to be._  
  
"I can't think about that right now," Mary says, her clammy hand slipping easily from his grasp as she gets to her feet again. "Excuse me, I think I'd like to go to bed. It's been quite a day."  
  
As she hurries from the room, she hears Richard make his excuses, too, then his heavier treads behind her as he follows her out into the hall. She quickens her pace, all but running as she tries to match her footfalls to the tempo of her racing heart, expecting Richard to catch up to her, to actually catch her in his arms.  
  
But he doesn't. He doesn't even call out to her until her hand alights on the ornately carved finial of the banister.  
  
"I've done it again, haven't I, Mary?" he says, stepping into the circle of lamplight at the bottom of the stairs. "Said or done something I shouldn't?"  
  
A strand of sandy hair has broken free of the pomade and falls over his forehead, making him look as he faces her from the other side of the staircase strangely like a suppliant schoolboy, though he must be Papa's age, or near to it. Somehow, taking in these details--or perhaps having withdrawn from Matthew, his voice no longer audible even though the drawing room door stands ajar--restores Mary's sense of clarity.  
  
"I can't decide if it's worse that you're either pretending to be so oblivious," Mary says, "or that you really are. Surely you noticed how uncomfortable you made everyone with your talk of Haxby and our marriage?"  
  
"I couldn't help myself. It's just that I got rather carried away by the excitement of today. Walking through our future home with you...I suppose it's made me a bit sentimental thinking about our wedding...our children...I'm very happy." He raises his hand, allowing it to hover for a moment over hers where it rests on the finial, before covering it with his own. " _You_ made me very happy today."  
  
He draws her hand upward to his lips, his eyes never leaving hers as he bestows such delicate kisses on her knuckles that she curses her black silk gloves she hasn't yet bothered to remove. But then his other hand clamps around it, too; his gaze darkens, and when he speaks again his voice is as rough as his touch.  
  
"I thought I'd made you happy today, too."  
  
If she had been happy--and she isn't at all sure she had--she's not about to own to it now; though she doesn't dare deny it, either, or attempt to struggle in his vice-like grasp.  
  
"It's cruel to flaunt our happiness in front of Matthew."  
  
In perhaps the most astonishing moment of a day that seems to have brought endless surprises, Richard releases her.  
  
"It's very tragic, of course, what happened to Captain Crawley," he says, rubbing his chin, "though if you ask me, he's made himself rather unhappier than he must be by breaking it off with Miss Swire. He might not have _everything_ I will, but he could have a wife to grow old with in this house. Which," he adds, drawing out the word, "I don't think I need to remind you, should have been _yours_."  
  
Years have passed since Mary resigned herself to not inheriting Downton, yet Richard's words, so deliberately chosen and carefully aimed, find a place buried down deep that's still raw. He knows her well--and yet not well enough to see that it's not Matthew for whom she harbours resentment for the entailment. The realisation makes her feel less vulnerable, more able to look Richard in the eye and fight back.  
  
"Matthew put Lavinia's happiness above his own. _You_ wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"  
  
She turns from him, placing her foot on the first step of the red-carpeted staircase.  
  
"I know enough about it to see he'd have let you go, too," Richard's voice arrests her ascent without his even having to touch her.  
  
Mary wishes she could hate him for saying it, but she can't even find it in her to be angry at him, no more than she can be angry at Matthew for being the future Earl of Grantham and master of Downton. The thought has niggled at the back of her own mind ever since Matthew sent Lavinia away, but she's pushed it back as she pushed Matthew's wheelchair through the grounds, desperate to believe that she is different, more adequate, more _needed_ than Lavinia.  
  
But she's not.  
  
And the dark-panelled walls and dim lights of Downton have never seemed more confining, more oppressive to her than they do in this moment.  
  
Richard brushes his fingers across her cheekbone, and she flinches, or shivers, or perhaps both.  
  
"That chapter of your book's finished, Mary. Time to start another one."  
  
"I kissed you, didn't I?"  
  
He lifts an eyebrow. "You kissed Mr Pamuk, as well," he says, as gentle as it is cruel; his hand opens over Mary's cheek, his thumb scuffing over her mouth, coaxing her lips slightly apart as her breath hitches. "A kiss can mean a lot of things."  
  
It's unnecessary for Richard to tilt her face up toward his as she arches up to meet him in spite of herself. His mouth is hard on hers at first, but then he yields with a shuddering breath against her when her hand goes up to rest on his neck, her silk glove stroking the bare skin above his collar where she can feel the frantic beating of his pulse in his throat. His hands cup her face and draw her further in to him as he deepens the kiss, bringing them impossibly close, and Mary thinks how he needs her. Matthew may not, but Richard does. If only as a foot in the door to good society or a teacher of etiquette, which at least would be something, but it's more than that.  
  
He wants her, as well as needs her, or he'd shake her hand or give her a peck on the cheek and not kiss her like this. And isn't wanting to be wanted what got her in this situation to begin with? What more can she ask for but that her future husband deem her _a helper suitable_ , in every way?  
  
What meaning does he draw from her kiss? she wonders, and no sooner does the question flit through her mind than Richard presses his lips once more to hers and draws back, regarding her with a gleam in his eye.  
  
"That one tells me you like stories with a little sex in them."


	3. Chapter 3

"Now _this_ is a surprise," says Richard, lowering his newspaper as Mary sweeps into the dining room the next morning, "seeing you at breakfast."  
  
Not as big of a surprise as he's given her, Mary thinks, but she says, "And here I thought I'd slip in unnoticed while you read your newspaper."  
  
She passes behind his chair en route to the buffet, but Richard catches her around the wrist, drawing her back to him as he tilts his face up toward hers for a kiss. Flushing, as much from the memory of his lips locked passionately on hers before she'd gone up to bed last night as from awareness that Carson stands at attention at his station by the sideboard, Mary turns her face so that his kiss will just graze her cheek.  
  
Richard, of course, can't leave it at that; he leans in closer to nuzzle her ear, his breath hot on her neck yet raising gooseflesh as he murmurs, "I _notice_ everything, Mary. I only _acknowledge_ what I deem worth my while."  
  
His fingers uncurl from around her wrist, but his eyes hold her where she stands.  
  
"You look lovely," he says. "It's nearly enough to make me reconsider attending church with your family."  
  
Mary outfit is the same scarlet skirt and jacket she'd worn when she called on Richard in his London office, chosen in consideration of the shameful confession she'd had to make. A little--but not by much--more subtle than a letter pinned upon her breast. She wonders if he remembers, if he'd made the connection then or now, but his lips curve softly, his eyes crinkle at the corners without a trace of their more familiar shrewdness, in what she can only take to be a look of genuine admiration of her person.  
  
Of desire for her, she amends, recalling how he'd kissed her last night. Is this how he's always looked at her? Cheeks prickling and pulse quickening, she tears her eyes away.  
  
"If you do, I won't be with them," she says, too embarrassed by her thoughts to spare Carson a smile of greeting as steps past him to pick up a plate from the buffet and begins scooping portions onto it without bothering to glance at the contents of the silver chafers.  
  
"You're not going to church?" Richard asks.  
  
Mary imagines Carson's substantial eyebrows rising on his forehead at this revelation, though she knows he's not unaware of how spotty her church attendance always has been, if she could help it.  
  
Until Matthew went off to France.  
  
" _You're_ not," she says, composing herself, and turns toward the table, where he sips his tea and watches her intently as she seats herself across from him. "Aren't I supposed to follow your lead in these matters, once I'm your wife?"  
  
"I believe wives are generally meant to have a gentling influence on their husbands with regards to religious practices. Politics, now--you're to form those opinions around mine."  
  
"I'm afraid I'm as likely to turn Liberal as you are to set foot in a church."  
  
Richard's chuckle rumbles low, underscored by a roll of thunder that had woken Mary earlier so that she lay in the grey dawn mulling over the things he'd said to her last night until she could no longer stand the sight of her red papered walls closing in around her. She chews her toast, the only appetizing thing she managed to put on her plate amid the kippers and stewed prunes taken by mistake, and thinks that the Richard sat across the breakfast table, leaning back comfortably in his chair, not trying to impress anyone is a Richard she can like. The Richard she _had_ liked, very much, at Cliveden, when they'd shared many a bantering conversation such as this one and it had been enough of a salve to her wounded heart that she'd allowed herself to consider it might be possible to be happy with a man who wasn't Matthew, after all.  
  
Not that the happy future she'd imagined herself sharing with Matthew had been built solely upon banter over breakfast. Or included stewed prunes.  
  
A flash of lightning illuminates the dining room, only to leave it feeling darker than the moment before.  
  
"I thought I'd go over to Haxby with you," she says. "If you don't mind."  
  
"Mind? It would please me very much to have the company during the drive."  
  
"Would it?" Richard's grin dazzles her nearly as much as the lightning beyond the windowpanes, so Mary adds another lump of sugar to her tea and takes a fortifying sip as Granny would no doubt advise. "Quite as much as the Sunday paper?"  
  
As if to emphasize his denial of the accusation, he folds up his newspaper and sets it aside. "I admit I'm rather curious as to _why_ you want to go. Somehow I doubt it's a desperate longing to see the business skills that earned my millions at work."  
  
"It's more a desperate longing to stop you from talking about all the millions you've earned and embarrassing yourself. And the poor Russells. Carson," she shifts her attention to the butler as she pours herself another cup of tea. "I'd been hoping for a moment to speak with you apart from the family."  
  
She watches as the dark eyes beneath the heavy brows flick sideways to Richard, and imagines the lines of his face etching themselves a little deeper in an expression of dislike before he returns his gaze to her with a deferential nod of his head.  
  
"I think I can guess what about, Lady Mary."  
  
"Sir Richard's told you how much we'd love to have you at Haxby?"  
  
"Indeed, m'lady."  
  
His embarrassment at the untoward offer of alternative employment is so palpable that Mary feels her own cheeks redden. She glares at Richard across the table for a heartbeat, then forces a smile at the butler that refuses to admit the awkwardness of this situation. A situation, she reminds herself, which she never should have been put in--and she doesn't mean the situation instigated by Richard Carlisle.  
  
"You know I've always expected to run a household with you as my right hand," she says. "Please say you'll consider it."  
  
She breathes again when she notes the softening of Carson's features. "What I say will, of course, depend on what his lordship says."  
  
"But if Papa says yes?" Mary feels like the little girl in braids who so often conspired with Carson in the butler's pantry, but she doesn't care, because he's giving her that indulgent look he'd always worn in those times, that made it so clear to him she was his favourite.  
  
"If it'll make you happy, Lady Mary."  
  
"Almost as happy as I'll make her, I'm sure," says Richard, chuckling at his own joke.  
  
"Oh, Richard. Don't you think that's selling Carson a bit short?"  
  
Mary meets his eye over her teacup, and though he says nothing--for once--his smirk very plainly states that he will later.  
  
She looks forward to it.  
  
~*~  
  
"Perhaps I won't bother hiring a butler at all," Richard says as he slides the old-fashioned brass key to Haxby Park into the even more ancient lock on the front door. "I'm quite capable of opening my own door, and I won't have to worry about you preferring Carson to me."  
  
It's the opportunity she's waited for, and Mary pounces on it. "Will you dress in livery, too?"  
  
The lines of Richard's face deepen in a frown as the key sticks and he must give it a two-handed wrench--and, apparently, curse under his breath--before the latch turns over with a _clunk_. When he turns to Mary, however, he looks smug rather than vexed.  
  
She tries again."You should have considered that before you asked Carson and made the offer to someone less agreeable than yourself. Like Thomas."  
  
"Corporal Barrow, the former footman who's now lording his military authority over Carson?" Richard asks, rubbing his chin. "I don't know, I find him rather relatable. A young man scheming to work his way up in the world...Perhaps I _should_ withdraw my offer to Carson and make it to Thomas instead. He'll be looking for work after the Army no longer requires his services, won't he?"  
  
Mary makes a sound that she realises, belatedly, is one she's heard Granny make in such moments as these. Usually involving Richard. "Well, it wouldn't be any more gauche than offering a job to your someone else's servant. And you wouldn't have to worry about _him_ stealing my affections."  
  
Richard lifts his eyebrows, the blue eyes beneath them gleaming almost hungrily. "I sense a story."  
  
"Only if you think the story about one of the staff nicking the good wine will sell newspapers."  
  
Though Mary harbours no especial like for Thomas--Papa should have sacked him before he had a chance to quit, in _her_ opinion--she does feel at least one person in the world ought to be able to keep a secret from Sir Richard Carlisle. Still, knowing the talent her fiancé possesses for sniffing them out--especially the really dirty ones--she's surprised when he doesn't question her further, but instead hauls open the great oaken door.  
  
He sweeps his free hand in an almost gallant gesture for Mary to go through. She does, but turns back on the threshold, curiosity getting the better of her.  
  
"Surely you're not going to let me off so easily for having a go at you in front of the man you hope to employ?"  
  
The stoop adds just enough to her height to place her exactly at eye level with Richard. Is he aware, she wonders, that he lifts his chin slightly so that he can just look down at her?  
  
"I hadn't planned on it," he says, "But I just became the owner of an estate, and social climbing always makes me feel like being nice."  
  
"Does it?"  
  
The only reply he makes with his lips is to brush them over hers. When his fingers alight on her shoulder, Mary instinctively leans in to him, fully expecting him to deepen the kiss; instead, he gives her a gentle nudge, and turns her to the open door.  
  
"Go on, then. Let's introduce Haxby to the new owners."  
  
She feels his hand at her back as she moves all the way to the very centre of the hall, looking up and all around at the white marble which reflects the grey light that filters through the high windows, actually making it lighter inside than it is outside.  
  
"Seeing it as more than just a big, empty house now that it's _your_ big, empty house?" Richard's clear tones reverberate through the space.  
  
Despite having come with him to escape the shrinking gloom of Downton, Mary had been braced for Haxby to feel like a prison or, at best, a gilded cage. She'd just wanted to get on with her sentence, but now that she's stood here, it doesn't feel like that at all.  
  
Haxby's not an empty house, it's a clean slate. A blank page. Waiting for her to write a new story on it. _Her_ new story.  
  
The room begins to glisten, then blurs altogether, so she keeps her back to Richard as she chokes out, "It's just _your_ big, empty house, until the wedding."  
  
From behind, he slips his arms around her waist and draws her back flush against his body, his chin prickling her skin as he leans around to press a kiss to her cheek. "But I bought it for you."  
  
Mary opens her mouth to say something snide about being more impressed with his gift if she didn't know he'd got it for a bargain, but finds she hasn't the voice. Or the heart. She can't mock Richard for who he is, because who he is right now is a man-- _the_ man--who wants to make her happy.  
  
The words she'd scratched in the old book return to her from seven years past, faded ink on yellow pages, blotted by tears: _For the first time, I understand what it is to be happy. It's just that I know that I won't be_. And beneath them, written in a hand as clear and bold as his voice, Carson's words: _Don't raise the white flag quite yet. You're still young._  
  
Well, she isn't very young now, but one thing she's sure of is that no white flag will ever fly above Haxby Park. Richard would never allow it, for one. Not he, who's never given up--not on the life he wanted, not on her. _We're strong, and sharp. We can build something worth having, you and I--if you'll let us._  
  
She'll let them.  
  
She'll do more than that.  
  
She turns in Richard's arms, scarcely taking note of his lips parting in surprise before she claims them with her own. When he tilts his head to return the kiss, his forehead bumps her hat askew; he starts to break away to prevent it slipping backward off head, but Mary grasps him by the lapels and holds him where he stands as the hat falls to the floor. His fingers find their way into her hair instead, brushing against the pins, and she imagines him carefully removing them, one by one, setting her hair free from its coif to tumble down, long and loose, over her back. Perhaps Richard imagines it, too, because no sooner has the picture flickered through her mind than his hands leave her hair.  
  
The disappointment she murmurs against his mouth turns to a shuddering gasp as he drags his fingers down her neck, his thumbs tracing the line of her jaw, her chin, the hollow of her throat.  
  
His palms and the tips of his fingertips are rough and callused against her delicate skin. Once Mary would have sneered at the telltale signs of Richard's humble roots, but now she relishes the sheer masculinity of them, the ambition and the passion they signify, which had earned him wealth and power, now focused entirely on her.  
  
She crumples his jacket tighter into her fists, drawing his lean body as close against hers as she can. Still he isn't close enough--though she gets nearer to what she wants to achieve when his fingers slip inside the velvet collar of her coat...beneath the neckline of her silk blouse...just skimming the lacy edge of her chemise...  
  
Richard tears his mouth away hers, only to dip his head to kiss the perfumed hollow of her throat; he withdraws his hands from her collar, but settles them on either side of her ribcage, high enough above her waist that his thumbs brush the sides of her breasts through her coat. She rakes her fingers through his thinning hair and bites down on her lower lip to stifle an undignified gasp when she feels him taste her, her pulse pounding beneath the tip of his tongue.  
  
"My God, Mary," he rasps, his breath so hot against her skin. "April suddenly seems bloody far away."  
  
"Did we settle on April?"  
  
He chuckles low, the rumble of it stealing all through her. "I did."  
  
"We don't have to wait, you know."  
  
Richard lifts his head, surprise as plain on his features as if it were printed there in large typeset. "I thought you'd prefer to start our married life here at Haxby, but if you don't mind staying in London for a while, I certainly won't object to pushing the wedding forward--"  
  
"I don't mean for the wedding," Mary says, rolling her eyes at his obtuseness, though inwardly she's pleased to learn that her past indiscretion hasn't made Richard less respectful of sexual boundaries.  
  
For a heartbeat he stares up at her, then, slowly, he straightens up, his hands leaving her to smooth his lapels and his mussed hair.  
  
"Tempting as that offer is," he says, "I'd rather not give you one more reason to feel you must marry me."  
  
She's been so engrossed in the story that's unfolded over the past few days that she'd all but forgotten what started it in the first place.  
  
"But I must marry you," she says. "Mustn't I?"  
  
Richard stoops to pluck Mary's hat from where it fell to the floor. As he hands it to her, his eyes don't quite meet hers. Almost if he is ashamed.  
  
Almost--but not quite enough to tell her _no_.


	4. Chapter 4

The rustle of paper diverts Mary's attention from the scene beyond the window: the skeletal forms of denuded late autumn trees veiled in fog from yesterday's rain, blurred as the motor speeds down the road. She commands herself to smile, but no sooner has she fixed the pleasant expression upon her lips than it falls again as she sees that Richard is _not_ , as she'd hoped, folding his newspaper and setting it aside, but merely turning the page.  
  
As she resumes glowering out the window, however, his gloved hand closes around hers where it rests in her lap. "Thank you for seeing me off to the station." He chafes her knuckles with his thumb--but his gaze still does not waver from the newspaper.  
  
"Why?" Mary pulls her hand from his grasp, busying her hands with a feigned search through the contents of her handbag. "You have your newspaper for company. There's hardly a point to my being here at all."  
  
In fact they've hardly spoken since leaving Haxby the previous evening, the awkward end Richard made to their passionate exchange in the hall having a rather stifling effect on further conversation, as well. And yet the dialogue in Mary's own mind had not ceased all through the night; she'd lain in bed feeling as though the red papered walls of her room were closing in on her, at once longing for the bright openness of Haxby and castigating herself for doing so, and for her naïveté in believing Richard capable of sustaining the gallantry he'd exhibited over the weekend in the long term. He'd asked her to give the house another chapter, not a three-volume novel. And apparently isn't as keen as she for that chapter to include a bit of sex.  
  
"It's Monday morning," the smooth rake of Richard's tones draws her out of her brooding. "Business hours. And I'd be careful how I spoke about _my newspaper_ , if I were you," he adds, a hard coldness creeping into his voice which matches the colour of his eyes as they scan the words printed across the page. "Remember, it has the power to give you a life."  
  
 _Or to destroy it_ , Mary thinks, but Richard looks at her, at last, and smiles. Not a twisted smirk, as his words might have indicated, but a gentle curve of his lips, his eyes crinkling at the corners and reflecting the golden glint of the morning sun diffused by the window and the lingering fog. For a moment she studies him, then snaps her handbag shut and directs her attention outside once more in her best impression of the aloof aristocrat, lest he see that she cannot read him and have that advantage over her, as well.  
  
He's still smiling as they stand together on the platform as Branson takes the bags to a porter, the dimples beneath his chiselled cheekbones disarmingly handsome, so she does her best not to let her gaze wander to them. In one hand Richard holds his valise, but the free one again captures Mary's fingertips.  
  
"We were standing just about here when I asked you to marry me, weren't we?"  
  
Before she can school them into rigid disinterest--cold and careful, as Richard himself as described her--Mary's eyebrows go up. Richard, nostalgic? Well, so is she; though _her_ memories are of standing in precisely this spot as she watched the train carry Matthew off to have all his hopes and hers with them gunned down in the trenches of the Somme.  
  
"How could I forget?" she says, making no attempt to hide her sarcasm. "It was such a romantic proposal. And you didn't really _ask_ me to marry you so much as _tell_ me you wanted me to."  
  
"Ah, that's right." Richard's gaze flickers downward to their loosely joined hands; before Mary can decide whether his cheeks are tinged with a blush, or if that's just the morning light reflecting off the glossy panelling of the train cars, he squeezes her fingers and meets her gaze again. " _You_ were the one doing all the asking, weren't you? Namely, why did I want you to marry me?"  
  
His smile fades, and Mary watches the roll of his Adam's apple down his throat beneath his starched collar as he swallows, hard. Nervously.  
  
"If I'd told you it was because I loved you," he says, "would it have changed anything?"  
  
"Not if you didn't mean it."  
  
Richard's valise hits the pavement at his feet with a thud, and he takes both her hands tightly in both of his, drawing her so near enough that her skirt brushes the hem of his greatcoat. "I never lie, Mary. _Never_."  
  
Of all the things he might have said, only this could have made Mary forget to breathe. _I can talk about love and moon and June and the rest of it, if you wish_. She'd thought he meant he viewed their marriage in a purely pragmatic light, and had no intention of pretending more depth of feeling than he possessed for the sake of mere convention. Not that he actually did feel more than he'd let on. As much as Matthew might have felt for her and now, more-- _much_ more--than Matthew had ever declared.  
  
But Mary isn't sure she's ready to own to that aloud. Not yet.  
  
"Except when you told me it was because you thought very highly of me?" she says. "And that you thought we'd make a good team who could build something worth having?"  
  
"That was all the truth," Richard insists, his fingertips pressing into Mary's palms. One corner of his mouth, however, quirks upward in a self-conscious smile. "Just not the _entire_ truth."  
  
With his dimples and the ends of his hair curling from beneath the brim of his hat, he looks almost boyish. And completely sincere. The fog that has been hanging about breaks, finally, dissolved by the sunlight beaming onto the platform as it had yesterday through the big windows of bright, gilded Haxby. Mary's head clears, as well, and warm fingers seem to steal all through her, loosening the icy knot into which her stomach had tied itself during her sleepless night, and extinguishing the burning tightness in her lungs as they expand with fresh air.  
  
"Obviously I misjudged you," Richard goes on. "I thought you'd laugh at me, or tell me love was very middle class. Our kind of people don't get excited, that's now how we are, and all that. If I could turn back time and do it all over--"  
  
His words are swallowed up by the blast of the train whistle, but Mary doesn't need to hear them to know what they are, or that in return for his total honesty, however overdue it might have come, she owes him hers.  
  
"I don't know if it would have made a difference then," she says when the shrill echo has died away into the din of porters loading baggage and passengers boarding the cars. The flicker of disappointment across Richard's face is unmistakable as he releases one of her hands and stoops to retrieve his valise; though earlier Mary had wished to wound him, she feels a corresponding ache in her own chest. Squeezing his hand, she adds, "But now…I think it may."  
  
It's not an impassioned declaration, not by any stretch--her kind _don't_ get excited, or at least she doesn't--but she thinks her actions in Haxby yesterday must have spoken quite a bit louder to him than these quiet words exchanged on the platform.  
  
And so had Richard's, that other morning two years ago, when he'd stood here in the swirl of smoke chuffing from the engine looking just like this wearing the same hat and greatcoat and hopeful expression. So exactly like then is this moment that Mary thinks she hears his husky words uttered through the dimpled smile: _I'm counting on it_.  
  
But Richard doesn't speak to her. Not audibly. He leans in and brushes his lips across hers, lightly. _Too_ lightly, Mary thinks, her body at once awakening to the memory of yesterday's kiss. She disentangles her fingers from his, lifting her hand to touch his cheek, and then all at once his hand is at the small of her back, pressing her snugly against him as her arms go about his shoulders, her fingers finding their way into the fine hair at the nape of his neck.  
  
Her story with Matthew never included a send-off like this.  
  
As if privy to her thoughts, when Richard draws back, he says, "My goodness, that was warm and heartfelt. I'm only headed to work, not to war, Mary."  
  
She doesn't blush at her display of unrestrained affection, but meets his gaze squarely. "Isn't everything a war with you?"  
  
His chuckle rumbles through her as he presses another kiss to her cheek, murmuring, " _Mmm_. And all's fair," and the smile never wavers from his lips, nor his gaze from hers until the train carries him around the bend.  
  
~*~  
  
Mary can't see Matthew's face at all as she pushes his wheelchair about the park when she returns from the station.  
  
She's glad.  
  
Particularly when he says, "So Haxby Park's yours now, your papa tells me."  
  
"Richard's," she corrects him, through a clenched jaw.  
  
What else has Papa said to Matthew about her and her forthcoming marriage? It's been a long time since she harboured any resentment toward her father for giving Matthew his preference or toward Matthew for securing it, but the old feelings rear up now like a horse that has never truly been broken.  
  
Oddly enough, it's the thought of Richard that reins them back in, a smile loosening her lips and the knot in her chest with the realisation that the brief exchange between her and Matthew echoes the one she had with Richard.  
  
"Although when I said as much to him," she tells Matthew, "he said he bought it for me."  
  
"Nothing says love like an empty house and twelve thousand acres."  
  
Though Mary's grown accustomed to Matthew's bitter tones in the days since they learned he would live out his days as the wheelchair-bound Earl of Grantham, she stumbles a little over a tree root to hear it directed at her. Eyes narrowing on the back of his head, she opens her mouth to utter words as sure to give him a jolt as the bump in their path, only to recall the way his face had looked across the dinner table when Richard talked about filling Haxby with children, and bite her tongue.  
  
"Forgive me." Matthew says, his voice coiled as tight as the tendons in the hand he drags through his hair. "Clearly Sir Richard does love you, very much. His happiness of late is…contagious."  
  
"As the Spanish flu?" With a sigh, Mary tightens her grip on the handles of the wheelchair and resumes their walk. "You know the thing is, Matthew, I believe twelve thousand acres _is_ Richard's way of saying he loves me."  
  
It helps, of course, that he has said it in so many words, but if she's honest with herself, she'd known it before he had, had felt it on both occasions they'd been at Haxby together; but she hadn't let herself accept it, hadn't let them build something worth having.  
  
"And the house won't be empty for long," she goes on, steering the chair toward a bench beneath the bare outstretched branch of an oak that's stood on the property since long before the walls of Downton were erected. "Richard's coming back at the weekend for an auction in York. I may even go with him."  
  
"Well if you should ever invite me to Haxby for a visit," says Matthew, visibly and audibly more relaxed as she sits at the end of the bench, angling herself conversationally toward him, "I promise I shan't refuse to make myself comfortable on your drawing room settee on grounds that you _bought it_. I might even talk about my own experience with furniture buying. Or recommend pieces for your home." He looks at her, a twinkle in his bright blue eyes for the first time in far too long. "Your grandmother, I recall, is quite fond of the swivel chair."  
  
They share a quiet laugh, and when it fades away, Matthew turns toward her a little more fully in his chair. "If I'm prying, Mary, please tell me, and I'll gladly shut up, but…When you say _Richard's way_ , I can't help but wonder what you mean. I think perhaps I can guess..."  
  
"No…" Mary gives a rueful little laugh as she watches her fingers smooth a wrinkle that doesn't exist on her skirt. "You really couldn't."  
  
Surely no one would guess that Richard had secured her hand with his tacit blackmail. The real question, she supposed, was whether anyone would be _surprised_ to learn the levels to which he was prepared to stoop to get what he wanted.  
  
Or how she could allow herself to forget it.  
  
Even this morning, after yesterday's reminder that she had no choice but to marry him, she had not been unmoved by his declaration. Quite the opposite, in fact. How could that be?  
  
She searches Matthew's face for answers, as if it makes no difference that he's not in possession of all the facts. Or even part of them.  
  
"Have you ever read a story that started out quite badly, but got better as it went on? Good, even?"  
  
What she really wants to ask is whether he thinks something worth having can be built on a shaky foundation, but that might invite too many questions. And she's afraid he might refer to certain parts of the Bible that come to mind now, when she least wants them to, about foolish men and houses built upon the sand. Which Haxby clearly is not.  
  
Matthew's eyes look beyond her shoulder, flashing almost white as the brilliant daylight strikes them; the hollows around them look even deeper and darker in contrast. Still, he fights a valiant battle to smile.  
  
"I daresay those are much more satisfying stories than the ones that start out well and end badly. I'm glad for you, Mary, that your story's turning out to be the former."  
  
 _Unlike mine_. The unspoken words resonate in the cold, empty autumn air as clearly as if he'd spoken them. It hits Mary quite suddenly that _she_ is not the one of them who has no choice in the course of her future.  
  
"Richard thinks you should still marry Lavinia."  
  
A cloud passes over the sun, and a shadow across Matthew's face, casting his haggard features into stark relief. His mouth twists. "How unfortunate I didn't think to consult with him before I broke off the engagement."  
  
Mary fights the urge to stand; she knows that tone, knows that if they'd had this discussion... _before_...that would have been the end of it. Matthew would have walked away, and Mary would have followed to make amends.  
  
Or would she? Had she ever trod carefully on Matthew's feelings before he'd been wounded? Was everything between them so utterly changed?  
  
"I only meant that if it would make you happy and Lavinia was willing--"  
  
"Willing?" he cuts her off, sharply, his eyes even more so. "Would _you_ have been willing, Mary? If we'd been engaged, and I'd gone off to war and come home…" He looks down, ashamed, at his useless legs. "...like _this_ …Would you have been happy to have a passionless marriage?"  
  
Though it's Matthew's lips that form the words, it's Richard's voice she hears in her mind, his breath warm against her skin as he whispers the answer to Matthew's question: _You like stories with a little sex in them._ And Matthew knows it--though he hasn't the slightest idea that Kemal Pamuk died in her bed or that she nearly gave herself to Richard just yesterday without so much as a blanket to lie down on.  
  
"And why," says Matthew, his voice breaking, "does no one consider whether _I_ would be?"


	5. Chapter 5

"Sir Richard still hasn't turned up, I see?" says Papa when he and Matthew come through to the drawing room.   
  
Mary draws in a breath through her nostrils, holding it in for a moment--along with a protest that if her fiancé _had_ arrived while the men were at their port, he wouldn't be found here, hungry and in his travelling clothes, because her fiancé is Richard Carlisle, and it's exactly the sort of etiquette he'd eschew--before releasing it, slowly.   
  
"My, Papa. That's the third time this evening you've asked about Richard. You sound almost _excited_ for his arrival. He'll be so pleased when I tell him. Usually he has the impression you'd rather he not be here at all."  
  
"I suppose being a keen observer of other people's moods is a skill Sir Richard honed in the newspaper business," Granny says.  
  
Papa thanks Carson for a cup of coffee with a smile that falls as he addresses Mary again. "He'll say the train is late, of course. I don't think it's possible that the train should _always_ be late whenever Carlisle comes up. More likely he _worked_ late."  
  
Granny makes a sound of disgust. "At that ghastly _job_."  
  
"You do all remember that _I_ have a job, too, don't you?" says Matthew. "One at which I've even, on occasion, been known to work late?"  
  
He shoots Mary a smile from across the room which, though it doesn't make his eyes twinkle as they would have in the old days, in the height of their flirtation, encourages her that she at least has one ally against this axis of disapproving family members. Though she can't decide whether his approval of her marrying another man hurts her more than it helps.   
  
"The law, at least," says Granny, "is a _respectable_ profession."  
  
"That's a different tune than the one you sang when we first learned the future Earl of Grantham was a solicitor in Manchester."   
  
Mary finishes her coffee, then stands and hands her empty cup and saucer off to Carson, whose indomitable eyebrows join in the furrowed centre of his forehead as he struggles to interpret the look she gives him, which begs him to forgive her what she's going to say next.   
  
"There was something I had intended to discuss with you in private, Papa," she begins as she picks her way around the sofa to join beside the fireplace, "but since you've already decided a public flogging is in order for Richard, I'll just come out with it. He's offered Carson a position at Haxby."  
  
"The butler position?"  
  
For perhaps the first time in her life, Mary silently blesses her mother's goggling incredulity, which provides a welcome distraction from Carson's embarrassment. She turns to find her perched like a statue at the edge of her chair, her coffee hovering before her mouth, open in an _o_ as round as her eyes.   
  
"No, Mama, the groom. And since I'm so fond of Carson, I haven't told Richard to withdraw the offer."  
  
Turning back to Papa, she finds that her armour of sarcasm fails to shield her from the coldness of his blue eyes as his gaze touches her.   
  
"Sometimes, Mary," he says, quietly, "I feel as though you are quite a stranger to me. This is one of those times."  
  
She wants to look away, but finds she cannot anymore than if she'd been frozen. It is the way she fears him looking at her if he ever learns how and where Kemal Pamuk died, and the reason she'd entrusted her shameful secret to Richard's safekeeping.  
  
"You know," Papa goes on, setting his coffee on the mantel; he clasps his hands behind his back and strides away from Mary to stand beside Matthew's chair, "I had hoped that your engagement would inspire Sir Richard to be more diligent in learning our ways. Instead it seems you've learnt his."  
  
"Robert," Mama chides, but Mary cannot be grateful for her mother's attempt at support, because her tone would hardly inspire repentance from an errant dog.   
  
And Granny contributes to the conversation with her usual talent for observing trivialities. "I suppose, Carson, that this means _you_ will have to learn Sir Richard's ways of before-dinner...what does he call those newfangled mixed drinks?"  
  
"Cocktails, Lady Grantham," Carson intones, looking for a moment as if he'd just had one of the bitter concoctions forcibly poured down his throat. "Though I suppose it's never too late for an old butler to learn a few new tricks."  
  
His gaze touches Mary's, and the warmth of it colours his sonorous baritone, too. That, and the knowledge that one of her favourite characters of her former life's story will play a prominent role in the chapters yet to come, thaws the part of her that has stood here in frosty silence.   
  
"You talk of Richard's ways as if you knew him so very well, Papa," the words leap from her tongue like stray sparks as the crackling logs settle in the fireplace, and she almost smiles as Richard's voice slides through her mind, calling her cold and careful. "Then it should come as no surprise to hear that _Richard's ways_ are to wait more than a year for me to give him an answer to his proposal, and then, having secured it, to wait even longer until he could find and refurbish a suitable house for me. He could have spirited me away to London, but he thought I'd want to be near my family, and to be kept in the manner to which I am accustomed."  
  
It's the first time she's enumerated all the good Richard has done for her, and even she can't deny it's quite the impressive prospectus for a husband-to-be. In fact, it might even be enough to put her in danger of feeling as strongly, and perhaps even as deeply as he claims to feel about her...  
  
...if only he hadn't blackmailed her into the engagement.  
  
Papa, on the other hand, knows nothing of Richard's underhanded schemes, at least as far as she is concerned, and yet remains unmoved from his prejudice.   
  
"My dear girl," he says, "there is more to _the manner to which you are accustomed_ than simply having a grand old house. And frankly the fate of Haxby Park hits rather too close to home. Thirty years ago it might have been Downton...made a casualty of this war as much as our fighting boys, emptied of all our family relics, sold to an interloper who can have no respect for these old country estates which represent hundreds of years of history and family, and thus will take no care to preserve the dynasty."  
  
"The Russells ought to have considered that before they destroyed _their_ dynasty," comes Mary's reply, perhaps as cold as Richard accused her of being, after all. Though certainly not careful. "And you might consider that Haxby Park, and every penny that bought it, is _Richard's_ , and his children-- _my_ children--"   
  
She must pause to draw in a steadying breath, so quickly does her heart flutter in her chest, and as she does so she cannot help but dart her eyes at Matthew, and give him a tiny smile she hopes he will understand to be an apology. For not accepting him before the war as she ought to have done, when she had no certainty that he would ever be anything more than a country solicitor practicing a law which Granny may or may not have found respectable. For not bearing his children while he could still produce them. For not having the strength to stand by him now. She blinks, and her blurred vision gives way to the clear form of Papa, who stands there talking to her as if she were a child of seven clutching a blank new copybook instead of a woman of twenty-seven whose story fills volumes he has never bothered to read.   
  
Cold _and_ careful, she repeats in her mind, exhaling long, her heart slowing in her chest as she draws back her shoulders. Yes, she can be very careful, indeed, when aiming for the jugular.   
  
"Our children will stand to inherit twelve thousand acres, a very large house, and every stick of furniture we buy tomorrow at auction. Even if they do have the misfortune of being born female."  
  
If any sound comes from Papa's gaping mouth, it's swallowed up by the click of Mary's heels as she steps off the carpet and onto the gleaming wood planks and hastily exits the drawing room. And by Matthew's voice, calling her name until she must stop in the middle of the saloon and turn back to see him laboriously pushing the wheels of his chair with his own hands. She would go back, but she doesn't wish to embarrass him, and so waits until he has drawn near enough to her to be out of earshot of the family.   
  
"I just want to say," he tells her, eyes turned upward, but not quite meeting hers, "that Sir Richard is a most fortunate man to have a woman who'll stick up for him the way you did in there. And I hope he knows it."  
  
"I do," says Richard, stepping out from the shadow of the columned archway nearest the drawing room, still in his greatcoat and gloves, hat in hand.  
  
Without pausing to consider whether it's more humiliating that he overheard the disparaging things her father said about him, or that he was privy to her defence of him, she goes to him. Silently. Automatically. And allows him to put the hand holding his hat on her waist, the fingers of the other curling around her elbow as he brushes his lips over her cheekbone. By all appearances a properly chaste kiss, even for the watchful eyes of her family, though the lingering warmth of his breath on her skin and the increasing pressure of his fingers on her elbow and hip speak to her of the more intimate moments they'd shared in the empty halls of Haxby, and the promise of more such moments to come.   
  
"Shall I have supper sent up for you?" she asks, inanely, when Richard draws back, her elbow still cupped in his palm. Though what else there is to say, she hasn't the slightest idea. She has said more tonight than she ever thought to say.   
  
"I ate on the train," he replies. "I think I'll just poke my head in the drawing room to say goodnight to your parents."  
  
Mary opens her mouth to tell him no, he's not dressed, that's not how it's done, he can see everyone in the morning, at breakfast, but she sees in his eyes that's exactly why he wants to do it. And, in light of what he overheard, she can hardly blame him for wanting to shame them by flouting their superficial notions of polite behaviour. Worse, she wants him to.   
  
"I hope you don't mind if I leave you to face the wolves alone?" she asks. "I need to be well-rested if I'm to endure an auction tomorrow."  
  
Richard lifts his eyebrows. "You still intend to go with me?"  
  
"I have to now, don't I? Because they don't want me to?"  
  
His hold tightens on her elbow, and he draws her so close against him that she can feel the tension in his body, and the quick rhythm of his heart beneath the layers of his clothing. She thinks for a moment that he will kiss her--properly by _his_ standards--right there in front of Matthew who is till lingering awkwardly outside the entrance to the saloon. But Richard he only embraces her and drops a kiss upon her hair before he lets go of her completely and turns to shake Matthew's hand before retreating into the drawing room.   
  
Leaving Mary to ascend the staircase and think that if she is a stranger to Papa, then the halls of Downton Abbey are a dark and twisting path through which her feet have never carried her before.   
  
~*~  
  
There are nearly a hundred rooms in Haxby; though Mary has yet to see them all, she walks the corridors with sure steps, as if guided along by the brilliant light that pours through the windows, unobscured by draperies, reflecting off the plaster and gilt-panelled walls. She doesn't see room upon empty room, but instead navigates through the house as if it already is what it will be: familiar to its mistress and furnished to her taste.   
  
And the furnishings purchased today at auction are, undoubtedly, to her taste even if the means of obtaining them isn't. Richard, on the other hand, is not half so pleased with the style of the furniture as with its having formerly belonged to a Rothschild who died with no nearer heir than a nephew who did _not_ find it to his taste and sold it for a fraction of its worth. Not _exactly_ what Mary imagined when Richard told her he thought they could make a good team, but it's something. Enough to make her slide her hand down from the crook of his arm to weave her fingers through his.   
  
Richard had been giving her an overview of the renovation plans he'd finalised during the week, but suddenly falls silent and glances down at their joined hands before looking back up at her.  
  
"I hope _you_ don't share your father's view of _en suite_ bathrooms?" he asks.  
  
The mere mention of Papa, even in mockery, rubs a raw place in Mary's heart. Instinct prompts her to open her mouth in stinging retort, only for her to notice at the last moment that though Richard is smiling at her, a crease has formed between his eyebrows that she has learnt is a sign of genuine insecurity. Swallowing her sarcasm, she gives his hand a squeeze.   
  
"No, actually," she says. "It must be the American in me--much as it pains me to own to it. And I quite look forward to having them to stay with us so I can force Papa to endure a little modern comfort."  
  
Richard's low chuckle accompanies them to a set of double doors with intricately carved gold leaf mouldings, which leads the largest and grandest of the family rooms. He releases her hand and tugs the doors open, then gallantly stands aside for her to pass through.   
  
"Ours shall be the ultimate in luxury, of course." The rumble of the doors as they shut underscores his voice. "I thought we'd use the whole of the room beyond this for our bathroom."  
  
Mary follows the sweep of his long fingers through a doorway to the adjoining room, which is fitted out with a dark masculine wallpaper much like that in Papa's dressing room at Downton, and then looks back at Richard.   
  
"But then where will _you_ sleep? Have you ordered an extra long bathtub?"  
  
"In here with you. Presumably."   
  
That ought to make her blush, Mary thinks, as her heartbeat accelerates not with embarrassment, but with exhilaration. She ought not to be here, alone, with Richard at all. She is a _lady_ , but this behaviour--along with that last week, when she responded so willingly to his advances-- no-- _offered_ herself to him--is so appallingly middle-class. Papa is right; she has learnt more of Richard's ways than he's learnt of hers, and--  
  
 _No._ After having Kemal Pamuk die in her bed, there is simply nothing left to blush about.   
  
"Forgive me for being vulgar and bringing money into the discussion--"  
  
"On the contrary," says Richard, slipping his arms about her waist and drawing her body firmly against his so that she must look up to him. "I never think talk of money vulgar."  
  
 _You wouldn't._ Aloud, Mary says, "Husbands and wives only sleep together if they can't afford not to."  
  
"Lord and Lady Grantham sleep apart, then?"  
  
He _can't_ know that the truth is quite to the contrary--though honestly, she wouldn't be surprised if he did. "If you don't mind, 'd rather not discuss the sleeping habits of _my parents_."  
  
Richard's eyes glimmer with amusement--and something else that makes Mary catch her breath.   
  
"Then we'll discuss ours." He leans in, his clean-shaven cheek smooth against hers, and his warm breath tickles her ear as he murmurs, "You needn't worry about sharing a bed with me, Mary. I don't snore."  
  
"What if I do?"  
  
His chuckle rumbles all through her, setting off a wave of shivers along with his hand as it roams upward from her waist; his thumb just skims her breast _en route_ to her arm, sliding up along her sleeve and over her shoulder before finally cradling her neck in his strong, callused fingertips and tilting her face up to his.   
  
"I'll wake you and make you stop."  
  
Presumably by kissing her, Mary has just time enough to think before Richard covers her mouth with his own, at which point all coherent thought is dispelled by the press of his lips and of his hips as the hand at the small of her back slides down lower, his fingers gently squeezing her backside to draw her even closer against him so as to leave her in no doubt of what he wants. Of what he intends.   
  
She knows why he brought her here, and it has nothing to do with their plans for filling Haxby with furniture.   
  
His teeth rake over her bottom lip as she pulls back, straining a little against the insistent hand at her neck, to break free from his kiss. Undaunted, Richard bends at the waist and dips his head, Mary's hands threading through his thinning hair, fingernails raking over his scalp, eliciting a low sound from his throat as he kisses a downward path along her jaw and neck toward the open collar of her blue coat.   
  
"I thought you wanted to delay this chapter until after the wedding chapter," she says.  
  
"I can't wait any longer," comes his rasping reply. "Not after hearing what you said last night."  
  
The growth of stubble on Richard's chin, yet too new to be seen, prickles against the sensitive skin of her chest as he stops his ministrations to look up at her. A shudder coursing down her spine, Mary realises how very cold the house is, shut up like this, none of the fires having been lit in months; the central heating he wants to have put in is an even better idea than the _en suite_ baths. She slips her arms beneath the lapels of his jacket, the warmth of his body radiating through his waistcoat.   
  
Of course he is warm, she thinks, her hand at his left side pulsing with his rapid breath and the hammering of his heart beneath his ribs. Richard never stops, an engine perpetually careening ahead at full speed, fuelled by his own intensity and ambition, until he arrives at his destination. Now, her.   
  
"Nobody's ever fought for me, Mary," he goes on. "I've only ever fought for myself and…" She watches his Adam's apple roll down his throat as he swallows. "You've given me the thing I wanted most from you. Well…" His gaze drops to her chest again, darkening, and his hands curl over her breasts through her clothing. "Except for this. Why would you fight for me if you don't _want_ to be with me?"  
  
 _Because I had to fight against Papa_. But Mary dismisses the thought with a gasp as Richard unfastens the two buttons beneath her breasts that clasp her coat snugly around her. He helps her out of it, letting it fall to the floor as he leans in to kiss her again. His fingers fumble at the buttons of her blouse, and she pulls away from him, slipping her hands out of his jacket. His brow furrows in confusion. Mary grasps his lapels, tugging the suit coat off his shoulders.   
  
"Evening the playing field?" Richard asks with a smirk as he shrugs out of it, allowing it to crumple atop hers on the carpet.   
  
"Does that sound like anything _I'd_ ever do?"  
  
Richard laughs low as Mary begins to undo the buttons of his waistcoat. "In this one instance, I'll gladly let you get ahead," he says, and raises his hands to loosen the knot of his necktie.  
  
If he is surprised by her boldness, he doesn't show it; Mary is, a little, for despite the earlier thoughts about her own sexual experience, she had laid passive beneath Kemal, content to receive pleasure as he was to give it--until he had died, anyway. In a way she feels even more ignorant now than she did then, when she had been aware of the mechanics of the act if not the joy of it, not at all sure how Richard intends to see it done in this setting, a vast room devoid of furniture, both of them with a full set of day clothes to contend with, where she and her Turkish lover had the ease of a bed and being dressed only in dressing gown and nightdress.   
  
Yet for all that, it feels just as natural, if not more so--to undress together, bantering as they do so. It's a headier foreplay than Kemal's practiced caresses, more intimate. For Richard knows her--which Kemal never did--even more than Matthew knows her.   
  
Divested of his waistcoat, Richard begins unbuttoning his shirt. Mary follows his lead and sets to work on the top button of her own blouse, only for him to catch her hands and push them away so he can perform the task himself.   
  
"You know just because I've had a ladies' maid all my life doesn't mean I don't know how to remove my own clothes," she says as her sleeves slide down her shoulders in a whisper of silk. The blouse pools at her feet; she kicks it aside.   
  
"A useless talent," Richard mutters, pulling apart the hooks of her corset, freeing her small breasts from the garment that binds them almost flat in a concession to the current boyish fashion.   
  
For a moment, Mary stands shivering and feeling slightly ridiculous with only her lace-trimmed chemise on top but fully dressed from the waist down, her nipples hardened to peaks and plainly visible beneath the thin cotton. But then Richard's mouth is on hers once more, the brass knob of the door cold and hard in the small of her back as he presses her against it, and there is nothing at all ridiculous about the situation--except that after all this they still have on too many clothes.   
  
As if they are of one mind, Richard's fingers tug her chemise free from the top of her skirt and slip beneath it to cup her breasts in his bare palms. In another moment the chemise has joined the pile of discarded clothing, and Richard is peeling off his undershirt and shucking it aside, as well, and then the whole big emptiness of Haxby contracts into a world that consists of nothing but the warm press of Richard's firm chest against her breasts, the trail of hair that runs the length of his stomach and disappears into his trousers pleasantly coarse upon her skin.   
  
"More," Mary murmurs between kisses and gasps for breath, " _Richard_ \--"   
  
He requires no further encouragement to hitch up her skirt around her waist and help her out of her bloomers. As he unfastens his trousers and undershorts, she hooks one leg around his thigh. Out the corner of her eye she sees his palm splayed against the door beside her head, and she focuses on the ripple of his arm muscles beneath his skin, biting her lip against a cry of pain, though she does not manage to stop the sound entirely.   
  
Richard whispers no reassurances that intercourse will not always be a discomfort, nor even kisses her by way of apology. Mary is glad. Even more so when he proves himself a considerate lover, but does not treat her as if she were a delicate thing that might break in his grasp. The door thunders on its hinges with their movements against it. She is strong and sharp, as he is.   
  
They come together on equal terms...  
  
...and begin to build something worth having.  
  
~*~  
  
When they return to Downton that evening, they meet Lavinia Swire standing in the saloon. Beside Matthew.   
  
Who is also standing.   
  
Standing supported by Miss Swire, but nevertheless, bearing his weight on his own two feet. As Dr Clarkson had said he would never do again.   
  
Mary had never thought he would smile as he used to ever again, either, but he's doing that as well. Her hand goes slack in Richard's, but he grasps it again, tight as a vice, and leans close to speak low in her ear.   
  
"Remember, my dear: we've written our chapter in indelible ink."  
  
 _The End_


End file.
